Hardware pushed to the limits according to Sega-16 members

[gamevet]

It's also not surprising that this thread turned into a bunch of Amiga examples. The graphics range from terrible to gorgeous from game to game and the gorgeous ones required really clever programming.

It was pretty amazing hardware, considering that it was launched just a year after the Famicom.

[goldenband]

The homebrew Vector Pilot, for Vectrex, is simply astonishing -- and hard to capture on video, though this gives some idea:

[ComradeOj]

The homebrew Vector Pilot, for Vectrex, is simply astonishing -- and hard to capture on video, though this gives some idea:

Pretty cool!

The physical release complete with the overlays and everything is pretty impressive too!

[goldenband]

Pretty cool!

The physical release complete with the overlays and everything is pretty impressive too!

Yes it is. I bought it on release and it was worth every penny. It's absolutely beautiful to look at, and plays like a dream, with more bells and whistles than anyone would expect. I don't know if it's the absolute best game on the Vectrex, but it's certainly the most impressive.

[cleeg]

Does Quake on Saturn count as hardware pushing?

[Blades]

Does Quake on Saturn count as hardware pushing?

Definitely.

Quake, and possibly Sonic R, got more graphical horsepower out of the Saturn than any other game I know of.

EDIT: There was an interview I read somewhere with an ex-Lobotomy developer discussing how they hit the absolute brick wall of the Saturn hardware with Quake. That's why there are a few changes to the bigger maps of Quake. I'll try to find it.

[GriskaGyoran]

Yeah the 128 colour stuff is just bullshit. SotB is 1+7+7+15 colours (back colour, background, foreground, sprites). It then changes those colours a bunch of times in the forest area to make it a lot more colourful. Lionheart does the same except the 15 colours are just for the main character and the other colours are changed way more often, to the point of being a bit rainbow puke in the first level.

The game Universe is pretty neat in that its art was done in 256 colours, then converted to 16 colours per line, which are switched in the game by the copper. Looks quite pretty:

So my suspicions it was some sort of raster trick done by the copper chip were true. Also that Universe looks very impressive, a lot like an MS-DOS game using an SVGA card.

I must throw my hat in the ring and say DOOM 3 on Xbox. The minimum specs to run DOOM 3 are literally double that of the Xbox's specs. I did notice that a few areas were cut out from the Xbox port, but the graphics barely took a hit aside from texture resolution and overall screen resolution since that was pre-HD era gaming and your average monitor was running at around 1024x768 vs 768/720x576 for your average TV.

[Sik]

It was pretty amazing hardware, considering that it was launched just a year after the Famicom.

But it was also much more expensive, wasn't it? Reminds me of the X68000, it was quite expensive for a games system, so they designed it like a computer instead to be able to justify the higher price. But it became bundled with Gradius to drive the point home ;P

[gamevet]

But it was also much more expensive, wasn't it? Reminds me of the X68000, it was quite expensive for a games system, so they designed it like a computer instead to be able to justify the higher price. But it became bundled with Gradius to drive the point home ;P

A $2,000 PC couldn't even come close to it in 1986. The North American console market was still dead in 1985, so selling it as a computer made perfect sense.

[Sik]

PCs were the worst computers of all at the time though =P

[Tower of Power]

So, how about talking about some Sega games that pushed hardware limits, especially Genesis, as there was some contention recently with Game Sack's list. Do games like Toy Story really push the Genesis hardware? And if so/if not, what other games do?

[Thief]

Definitely.

Quake, and possibly Sonic R, got more graphical horsepower out of the Saturn than any other game I know of.

EDIT: There was an interview I read somewhere with an ex-Lobotomy developer discussing how they hit the absolute brick wall of the Saturn hardware with Quake. That's why there are a few changes to the bigger maps of Quake. I'll try to find it.

I always thought Shining Force Scenario 2 and 3 did a lot with the Saturn graphically. Then there's also this part I read in this 1up interview http://www.1up.com/features/oh-camelot;

1UP: SFIII made innovative use of the Saturn's difficult architecture, using the system's powerful sound-board to simultaneously stream game data for near instantaneous transitions from the overworld map to the 3D battles. Can you tell us more about how you came to devise such a unique use of the hardware?

YT: The key to using the sound board without having CD audio to play the music definitely came down to pre-loading the data. When a selected 2D character would move across the screen, data for polygon characters would be loaded, and it would complete just as it was time for the screen to switch over. That's why you can see the battle screen switch in just a moment. The developers were really unhappy with the wait time for CD loading, and so the developers made their decisions based on taking the frustration out of actually playing the game.

1UP: Are there any other neat tricks you made the Saturn do to that you can share with us?

YT: Combining textures in real-time, and other animation tricks. We did that with the internal DSP. We used that for things like animating flowing rivers, and the like.

Though I wouldn't know what exactly would be pushing the hardware or just being clever.

[magicalsoundshower]

If Noah Antwiler needed to upgrade his PC in order to play Ultima 7 he must have had a crap PC at the time.

Not so sure about that, I clearly remember reviewers docking points off the game because it tended to run very poorly on medium range PCs at the time. If I recall correctly, it hardly ran on a 386 and if you wanted decent performance, you needed a 66 Mhz 486 with 4 megabytes of RAM, which cost quite a ton of money in 1992.

I don't like Ultima VII either, by the way, the viewing angle, interface and combat are just awkward.

[gamevet]

So, how about talking about some Sega games that pushed hardware limits, especially Genesis, as there was some contention recently with Game Sack's list. Do games like Toy Story really push the Genesis hardware? And if so/if not, what other games do?

Herzog Zwei. When your opponent loaded up his base with a half dozen Jolly Rogers and a ton of ground troops, everything just starts slowing down.

[cleeg]

Definitely.

Quake, and possibly Sonic R, got more graphical horsepower out of the Saturn than any other game I know of.

EDIT: There was an interview I read somewhere with an ex-Lobotomy developer discussing how they hit the absolute brick wall of the Saturn hardware with Quake. That's why there are a few changes to the bigger maps of Quake. I'll try to find it.

Thanks, that'd be interesting.